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SanDisk Releases 512GB SD Card
Lucas123 writes: SanDisk has announced the world's highest capacity SD card, a 512GB model that represents a 1,000-fold increase over the company's first 512MB card that it shipped a decade ago. The SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I memory card has a max read/write rate of 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. The card is rated to function in temperatures from -13 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. The 512GB model retails for $800. The card also comes in 128GB and 256GB capacities.
Why the hell are we talking about the Fahrenheit scale. And, while we're at it, memory of all kinds is always expressed in GiB, so a 512GB card is 1024 times as large as a 512MB card, not 1000 times.
It looks like a standard -25 to 85C extended commercial rating.
No, that would be MibiBytes and GibiBytes. A GB is 1000 times larger than a MB.
And now we have a decent sized amount of space for digital video. Huzzah!
Poorly written summary. You're basically saying that the 512GB card comes in lower capacities.
Better to say that the new line also has 128 and 256GB cards available.
Only if you use the newfangled redefinitions. A traditional GB is identical to a GiB.
The OP is correct. Memory is always expressed in GiB. There is no such thing as Base-10 memory.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world; Those that know binary and those that don't.
And the marketing idiots that came up with that crap are firmly in the "don't" group!
Just how many Libraries of Congress are we talking about, here?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
So the highest MP camera I could find in a normal store is 40 Mpix (Pentax 645D) * 14 bit RAW = 70MB/picture. So good for 70,000+ photos. Or the Panasonic HC-X1000 4K/24 & UHD/60p camera just released, 150 Mbps = 7-8 hours continuous recording. But I suppose it's good for when you want to carry 10 BluRays in your phone. Whoops, wrong format not microSDXC. I guess there's a niche for this since they made it, but I kinda fail to see the target market, unless it's the "give me the biggest and best you got" crowd.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You are wrong. Memory is not always expressed in GiB, and there are certainly architectures with base 10 memory (you only show you are young making a silly assertion such as that)
Base 3 for the win! :-D
Time to upgrade the bandwidth calculations for a station wagon full of SD cards.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
In case you haven't noticed, manufacturers of transistor based memory (flash, SRAM, DRAM, EEPROM, etc.) still use the 2^10 definitions. To this day, I still can't believe the marketers convince IEEE to make up the silly sounding names for the 2^10 definitions. If I had a say in the definitions, I would have tagged on subscripts of 2 and 10 to the end of the units to indicate the difference.
By the way, under both sets of definitions, 1024 bytes = 1 KB = 1 KiB. It's only for MB and higher that it diverges.
For everybody living out the the Bahamas, Palau, the USA, Belize and the Cayman Islands who struggle with the odd Imperial system, the temperature range of this SD card is between -25C and 85C.
No, a "traditional" GB is the one that was defined way before computer scientists got their hands on it –1000. The 1024 "definition" is actually simply a bug. Engineers working on early machines had a choice – take a bug that pretty much no one would notice on an early machine (because files over 1kB were very rare, much less ones over 1MB), or take a massive perf hit. It takes a long time to compute the size of 20 files when a division by 1000 takes 300 odd cycles on a 10kHz machine. It doesn't take such a long time when a right shift 10 takes 1 cycle.
Bottom line, early engineers decided a known bug was better than the enormous perf hit of getting it correct. That doesn't mean that what they did is now correct. It means it remains a bug in some OSes.
Well, this is in the context of removable memory on the market today. Your shot.
You only show you are old that anyone would be talking about systems using base 10 memory.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
If only my iPad had an SD card slot.
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Never been known to fail..."
This logic, reduced ad absurdium, basically says we've had the technology since the dawn of man.
The first IBM PC should have run at 4,77 Gigahertz, not megahertz, and should have been released in 1774 after the continental congress convened at the cost of 1 ha'penny.
512GB with a max read/write speed of 90-95MB/s will take at least an hour and a half to transfer all of the data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte says:
and
Note the difference: kB vs KB.
>newfangled
correct
There, fixed that for you.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I think you're being overly simplistic and obtuse, borderline pain in the ass in fact. You ARE on a nerd website after all (and I'm sure this isn't your first day on /. either) so use your head and I'm sure even you yourself could deduce that for Sandisk to magically release 128, 256 AND 512 GB memory cards within a year tells you that they have had the ability to do this for quite some time. But I'm sure somehow you'll enlighten me to something completely opposite...look forward to you proving me right.
And yet, people will still pay an extra $100 for 16GB more memory on their iPhone.
You only show you are old that anyone would be talking about systems using base 10 memory.
Like disk storage today
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
there are certainly architectures with base 10 memory
Citation needed. I have never come across such architecture.
It takes a long time to compute the size of 20 files when a division by 1000 takes 300 odd cycles on a 10kHz machine.
Sorry, man. Division by 1000 isn't even remotely a 300-cycle operation. If you're dividing by 1000 a lot, you're going to multiply by the reciprocal of 1000 instead of doing division. For 16-bit arithmetic, we're talking 6 single-bits shifts and 1 addition, worst case.
I don't believe so. Just look at the picture in this article. That's some extreme stacking going on. There's a degree of competition and collusion in all of the tech markets. But at the end of the day, you are still going to get a space age product that is improving and becoming cheaper over time.
32 GB get as low as $11-14. 64 GB is $20-30. 128 GB is more like $70-80. It's not a stretch to say that it is harder to fit more in a smaller area, the resulting product is more valuable, and some customers will gladly pay more $/GB for density. For everyone else, there's the 32-64 GB cards.
Silly me, and here I thought it was because data is stored in POWERS OF 2 and memory is addressable in POWERS OF 2. I don't know about you, but I would rather say 1GB than 1.073741824GB.
This isn't "memory." This is disk.
Disk storage is not base 10, it uses a base 10 number of base 2 blocks. Show me a single drive that optimally aligns data to a base 10 address.
The underlying chip is 512 GiB. The controller reserves about 7% of that for spare sectors used for defect management and wear leveling, leaving 512 GB.
A kelvin is 1/273.16 of the temperature at oxidane's triple point. The choice of oxidane is arbitrary, just as the earlier choice of the same substance for Celsius was arbitrary.
Is your iPad's dock connector 30-pin (iPad 1-3) or Lightning (4, Air, Mini)? If 30-pin, try this product. If Lightning, try this product.
You are not seriously considering recording 4K with only 150mBit, right? That would be idiotic, after all.
Common 4K cameras would fill up this card in a little over one hour of recording time.
No, this is *storage*.
Some Burroughs comercial machine had base 10 memory addressing, notably the B2500 and B3500. From Wikipedia: "Memory was addressed down to the 4-bit digit in big-endian style, using 5-digit decimal addresses."
It takes a long time to compute the size of 20 files when a division by 1000 takes 300 odd cycles on a 10kHz machine. It doesn't take such a long time when a right shift 10 takes 1 cycle.
This must be the most clueless post about the 1000/1024 divide so far. It never had anything to do with the computer's performance, it's that when you build a digital computer a lot of things will be sizes of two because what you can address with n bytes will be 2^n. Physical memory, memory pages, caches, buffers, floppy and hard drive sectors all the "microunits" in the computer are powers of two. Hint: No actual hard drive gives you 1MB = 1000000 bytes because it's not divisible with 512, in reality they give you 1954*512 = 1000448 so they don't underdeliver. Actually make that divisible by 4096 for modern HDD drives with 4K (no, not 1000) sectors.
There is a single reason why computer scientists usurped the prefix kilo and that is because they needed to describe "one thousand and twenty four bytes" - or multiples of that - very, very often. They needed a shorter name, they never needed the unit "1000 bytes" and so "one kilobyte" became their shorthand for 1024 bytes. And unless you're really good at doing math in your head, tell me how much is seven kilobytes exactly? (And if you answer 7000 I'll slap you). We still say 512GB of RAM. Nobody wants to say 549.755813888 GB of RAM, because multiply that with a billion and you have how many bytes that is. It's not some nice, round number.
Either way you're going to run into some f*cked up conversions if you mix GiB and GB, which I'll use now for clarity. If you have 512GiB of RAM (hey, servers do) and load 512GB from disk, how much of your RAM have you used up? Now while you're calculating that, this other person who uses a GiB system says so that was like ~477 GiB so like ~35 GiB free? Or you have to say you have 549.8 (rounded) GB RAM and use exactly 512 GB. Of course in reality file sizes are probably a rather random size so you'll have two long floating point numbers. At least with base 2 you just have one, because you have exactly 512 GiB RAM.
And when you do have base 2 numbers then multiplication/division gives other nice base 2 numbers like 10 MiB / 2 KiB = 5 KiB. 10.485760 MB / 2.048 KB = how much? It's a lot uglier if you numbers are 2^n values, which again they will be a lot of the time. At least far more often than base 10 as long as you're working with the computer itself and not business data or whatever. If you for example want to make something fit in L3 cache to optimize and algorithm, the numbers will be in base 2. You can't "bugfix" your way out of that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
SanDisk if you are reading this please make a 512GB Micro SD... thanks!!
Computer scientists? Did they just choose it at random? I thought it was because 2^10 = 1024, therefore 2^30 = 1073741824.
That would suggest, to me, that it was a mathematical definition and not chosen by computer scientists.
More than that, it would suggest to me that 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 was a redefinition of a known quantity by a third party.
Look at nearly any early computer. An IBM 1620 for example. Using base-2 came after realizing there was unused state left behind.
The discussion is about capacity, and disk drives, SSDs, and yes even these memory cards ("1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes" - Sandisk) use the metric prefixes correctly. How you can claim that's a "base 10 number of base 2 blocks" is a mystery. Yes, they may address base 2 sized blocks (e.g. 512 or 4096), but the total capacity is specified in base 10. (and the block address is expressed on the interface with a base 2 number, not BCD.) But that's not the capacity, which is what's being discussed.
It seems like disk manufacturers don't reveal specifics like they used to, but it wasn't uncommon to find organizations like 17 sectors/track and other non-base 2/10 layouts.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The largest files you can get from a camera are TIFF not RAW, and thus you'd be looking at 40Mpix * 16bit per pixel per channel (remember a final image is per channel, the RAW has a beyer matrix) * 3 channels = 240MB/picture. That's only 2200 photos on your super memory card now.
Why would you shoot in TIFF? Production ready from the camera. If you shoot at an event you can use the camera to process the image and then save an uncompressed file ready for print / transmission. Kind of important if you want to get the publication out quickly.
But lets pick an example closer to home. I went on holidays last year and snapped away 11000 RAW files. On the D800 that's around 60MB/file or closer to 45MB with NEF compression. At 459GB this would have done away with my need to cart two external harddisks and a laptop with me. I was actually considering buying little memory card copying unit that would have done away with the laptop, just slot in the card and it auto-copies to the harddisk, but they were ludicrously expensive.
I can totally see a use for this. I can actually see a use for 2 of these (my camera can write the same photo to two cards at once). 11000 files are a lot to lose in one go.
Computer scientists? Did they just choose it at random? I thought it was because 2^10 = 1024, therefore 2^30 = 1073741824.
That would suggest, to me, that it was a mathematical definition and not chosen by computer scientists.
More than that, it would suggest to me that 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 was a redefinition of a known quantity by a third party.
Ah, let's get one thing straight here. The notion of a byte did not appear before computer science. Anything that measures bytes is ultimately CS-derived, even if marketing folks like to confuse people.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
a 512GB model that represents a 1,000-fold increase over the company's first 512MB card...The card is rated to function in temperatures from -13 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. The 512GB model retails for $800.
All that in a standard 1 1/4 x 1 inch package. Amazing.
Is that why my terabyte drive registers as 917G?
Well, using common core math, maybe.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
The units cancel, so you get 5K er... 5*1024 = 5120.
My favorite solution to the issue is to treat GB, MB, and KB as special units whose meanings are 1024MB, 1024KB, and 1024B, respectively. That's what they've meant for decades, and I'm not going fiddle with giving them two incompatible meanings now. IMO if powers of two don't matter in a particular context, it's cleanest to use Gb, Mb, and kb, SI units referring to 1000Mb, 1000kb, and 1000b (bits), respectively. Bits are a fairly fundamental unit.
That was pretty silly of you, given that data isn't stored in powers of two. When was the last time you saw a hard disk with an exact power of two capacity?
Yes, because your OS incorrectly computes the number of GB. It computes the number of GiB, and then displays GB.
Notably, if you stick that same terabyte drive in a mac, or many linux boxes, it'll register as 1TB.
RAM is always expressed in GiB. Everything else (storage and network speed, for example) is expressed in Base-10. This has been true for a very long time (although there was confusion in the early days when disks and blocks were small).
Well "incorrectly" is a loaded term. Si prefixes are base-10 but the byte is not an SI unit. The IEC issued a standard saying that binary versions of the prefixes should be indicated with an extra i but only long after the use of those binary prefixes without the i was well established in the computer software industry.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Hmm. So you get easy access to amazing hardware that previous generations could only fantasize about, at bargain-basement prices, and still you manage to find a way to get upset about it, because somewhere out there, somebody might be making a profit by supplying you with products you want at a price you're willing to pay.
I'm finding it a bit difficult to feel much sympathy for your plight.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Too bad Google crippled SD cards in Android so they can sell cloud services.
Too bad tablets and phones don't use SD cards.
To bad too many companies make SD cards that stick out.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Kilobyte = 1024 is a standard too, by the way. It's the JEDEC standard for memory sizes.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
RAM generally is, and address space always is.
Balanced ternary
Both wrong anyway - going from 512 to 512000 would only be 999-fold increase.
Actually folding things don't change their size just their shape.
> Disk storage is not base 10, it uses a base 10 number of base 2 blocks. Show me a single drive that optimally aligns data to a base 10 address.
When you include all the bits in a hard disk sector it isn't base 2 either. Stuff like pre-amble, servo track number, ecc, etc. Taken all together a full-blown sector on any given hard disk is some oddball number of bits, may not even be an even number, much less base 2.
...in a decade or so 1 LoC will fit on a 1 portable memory device the size of a postage stamp?
I mean... only a decade or so ago 1 portable memory device the size of a postage stamp had about 1000 times smaller capacity.
Which means that we'll finally be able to use LoCs as a practical measure of size, distance, speed, weight...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The new GoPro camera...which hasn't come out yet...is said to effectively capture video at double the rate that it currently does. So it can do 1080p at 120 frames/second.
But there's a problem with that...the existing GoPro, at half that speed, requires the very fastest of SD cards (UHS Speed Class 3) to be able to write the data fast enough. So I was wondering how the hell the camera would even be able to work at 120 fps 1080p resolution in the first place. This card, with its throughput, answers that, since it's triple the UHS Speed Class 3 specification.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Just think, if we all had sixteen fingers we would use hex and this argument would be unneccessary. And it would be easier to type.
At $800 a pop. Services like "Cash for SD" will soon become popular.
"Someone stole my £30 camera"
"Thats a shame"
"But it had a £600+ SD card in it"
"......giggle........"
No, the OS is correct, it just uses the JEDEC standard instead of the IEC one. JEDEC is preferred by many electronic/firmware engineers because all the manufacturers of memory (RAM, flash, EEPROM etc.) use it and almost all addressing schemes use powers of two.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are 10 types of people in the world...those who understand binary, and those who don't.
To those who responded to this guy: ***whoosh***
There is a target market for everything.
For example, a high end graphics card can be called overkill, until you bring in gaming.
So who shoots 70000 pics? Well for one, us timelapse folks. often to get a 30fps, a 10 minute time lapse means 600 seconds = 18000 frames.
This is just a 10 minute sequence.
Then there are the sports guys. Often each shot is a 80 frame sequence, then pick out the best. Again, one day means 15-20000 pics. Many shoot RAW+JPEG, so that is going to increase the space.
Last but not the least, 4K video is approaching 100mbps.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I have an irrational desire to slap the people who thought inventing GiB was a good idea. I hope it's forgotten eventually. All the justifications for it were (and still are) bullshit -everyone knew what HD vendors were doing and no one who mattered was confused. That's still true , but now I have to explain to people that no, it's not a speech impediment...
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
My preference for the abbreviates has been:
1 KB = 1,024 bytes
1 kB = 1,000 bytes
1 Kb = 1,024 bits
1 kb = 1,000 bits
To be clear, capital refers to 1,024, lower refers to 1,000. Capital refers to bytes, lowercase refers to bits.
The same pattern exists for Mega and Giga, so 1 Mb = 1,024 Kb. (For transmission speed, 1 Mbps = 1,024 Kbps.)
That's different than the numbers used in your example.
Sure, that makes sense for the numbers. But JEDEC and IEC use the same numbers! JEDEC just uses SI's prefixes while changing the meaning.
I don't understand why JEDEC would be preferable to IEC, which has different prefixes to reflect the different numbers. Is it just because of habit and because the prefixes are shorter?
Hard disks are however many bits fit in the area of those circular pieces of metal. Those numbers are often not even even, let alone an integral power of two.
Microsoft has had plenty of time to fix that, either via an utterly simple string replacement, or a minutely less-simple calculation (size / (1024^n / 1000^n) where n is the power of thousands in size). I wonder how much of a kickback Microsoft took from the lawyers in the frivolous lawsuits against Western Digital and others.
That was pretty silly of you, given that data isn't stored in powers of two. When was the last time you saw a hard disk with an exact power of two capacity?
pretty much every day. look at flash drives for an easy to see example.
some overhead is lost in formatting the drive, so if you count bytes you have to include that
1998, Maxtor 120MB IDE drives were the last drive that I bought, that were not 120000000 bytes, they were 125,829,120 bytes.
1000Mb is 125MiB... B is for byte, b is for bit.
Wrong, 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128.... 8 fold increase.
A 999 fold increase from 512 would take ~126 pages of numbers to represent.
It bugs me when fold is used to represent multiplication, when it means folded, or doubled.
SCSI drives continued to have the actual stated capacity (or typically, slightly more) for a long time when ATA drives where already labelled based on the base-10 fraud.
Base-10 units are not in any way more correct than base-2 units. They are merely more consistent with the way scientific units are generally used (but less practical, since base-2 units correspond to how data is actually addressed and alligned).
I do not oppose people using base-10 units. I do, however, oppose people redefining well-defened units. The idiotic extra i (KiB, MiB, etc.) should have been inserted in the new (base-10) units, not in the existing units. This creates unnessary ambiguity.
Why is this flamebait? I refuse to speak these words as well. A GB is 1024MB. The other thing is some asshat 20 years late to the party solving a problem that almost no one thought was a real problem. Fuck'em.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Except the card can write at 90 not 150 Mbps so unless you are going to RAID a few of them it can't even do that. But I'd like to see a little SDCube RAID in action.
> it just makes more economical and strategic sense to go buy several smaller capacity cards and swap them out when full.
> But what do I know...
Not much it seems. Swapping a memory card while your in the middle of a timelapse sequence with the camera sitting up on a hill at night isn't very practical. This card isn't for joe hobbyist that snaps a few pictures.
I doubt they have had the ability to mass produce these in economical numbers until recently. Just because it can be made doesn't mean it can be made profitably if yields are small.
Really your whole idea about milking the consumer is kinda odd for someone on a tech site. Must be new to this world as this is how its gone for more than a decade.
File systems are always organized with sector and cluster sizes that are a power of 2. It's true that modern hard drives use the power of 10 definition for a Gigabyte, but this is mostly for marketing reasons. You'll notice your operating system reports the drive space as a power of two regardless of whether it uses GB or GiB as the unit. Most current OSes use GB for 2^30 instead of 10^9.
Almost all modern operating systems report hard drive space in Kilobytes (2^10), Megabytes (2^20), Gigabytes (2^30), and Terabytes (2^40). This has been standard as long as I've been using computers, which is over 30 years. Gibibytes are what you get when a third party who has no stake in something tries to impose a definition on someone. Hard Drive manufacturers only use the redefinition of Gigabytes/Terabytes because they can claim their drives are bigger and they're relying on the confusion caused by the redefinition.
No, they didn't "realize" anything, the decimal architecture was done on purpose to be user friendly; IBM made purely binary machines before, during and after the 1620 and related systems.
Base-10 units are not in any way more correct than base-2 units. They are merely more consistent with the way scientific units are generally used (but less practical, since base-2 units correspond to how data is actually addressed and alligned).
I do not oppose people using base-10 units. I do, however, oppose people redefining well-defened units. The idiotic extra i (KiB, MiB, etc.) should have been inserted in the new (base-10) units, not in the existing units. This creates unnessary ambiguity.
I was referring to the internationally standardized system of units. Not the intrinsic merits of any particular base.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
No, the JEDEC standard actually agrees with the IEC one - it states that for memory you can optionally use the SI prefixes with binary calculations, but that for storage you should use base 10 computations with the SI prefixes.
Last I checked the prime factors of 125829120 were 2, 3 and 5, and it very much was not a power of two because of that ;).